INCIPIT 2026

Incipit means 'it begins.' This is the first Wildcabinet collection: eighteen paintings, made over several years, in four bodies of work.

The Cabinet of Small Worlds are painted years. Invictus is one held still and ordered; Green Cabinet is the year after, as nature began taking the shelves over. Green Lush and After Rain go closer still, into one corner of Green Cabinet, until the world inside is something you step into rather than look at.

The Small Narratives are where I kept talking when words ran short – small, sometimes surreal scenes, their meaning not always fixed, said with the brush because I couldn't say them any other way.

The Specimens are insects, each one alone on white paper the way a natural-history plate isolates its subject. The Latin name beneath is a kind of contract: it tells you whether I kept the creature real, named it for a feeling, or invented it outright. All three were drawn out of Green Lush, one at a time, onto the white.

The Materia is where the paint itself is the subject. Prima Materia was my first watercolour – alchemy's word for 'first matter,' which turned out literal, because the way I work was born in it and I have never stopped; there is always one going somewhere. Flow is its quieter twin: a colour study with no technique to decode and nothing to solve, somewhere to rest your eyes.

What runs through all four is that nothing stands alone. A motif from one painting – the dropped dot that begins in Prima Materia, a recurring figure, a whole small picture – surfaces again inside another, because art is interlaced in my mind, so it has to be interlaced on paper. Each is available as a fine art print. Come and find your way in.